View full sizeJohn Berry / The Post-StandardDanel Barron, a parking checker for the Syracuse Police Department, issues a parking ticket for a car parked on the 300 block of Walton Street that had gone beyond its allotted time and grace period of six minutes. If the ticket was written before that grace period, it could be waived during an appearance at the parking bureau. Beginning Monday, ticketing will begin ten minutes after time expires, with no additional grace period.

Syracuse, NY -- Syracuse is ending its policy of writing parking tickets for people who were late by just a few minutes. Starting Monday, parking checkers will give drivers a 10-minute grace period after the expiration of a receipt from the city’s parking machines.

The move is an acknowledgment by the city of the problem with its parking policy since 2004. The city allowed its checkers to ticket drivers who were late by two or three minutes. But it had a little-known policy of forgiving a ticket given to any driver whose receipt ran out within six minutes of the ticket — as long as the driver appealed to the Parking Violations Bureau.

Most people were unaware of the unofficial six-minute policy unless they called City Hall to complain about the ticket. It’s likely that hundreds of people paid the fines on tickets that would have been dismissed if those people had known to complain.

“You don’t nurture a civic renaissance by hammering shoppers and diners who are seconds late when they park,” he concluded.

His readers agreed. So did City Hall.

Bill Ryan, the chief of staff for Mayor Stephanie Miner, said Kirst’s column and the public conversation that followed made it clear to the city that the policy was unfair. The burden shouldn’t be on people to complain in order to get out of a ticket, Ryan said.

It would be more fair, Ryan said, if people were given some wiggle room before parking checkers wrote tickets. So the city settled on the new policy of simply not writing tickets within the first 10 minutes.

Ryan said he hopes this will address concerns that parking checkers were “lying in wait” in hot spots around the city, ready to ticket people as soon as their time ran out. The owner of Freedom of Espresso, on Pearl Street, recently said she was planning to move her business elsewhere because the tickets were such a problem for her customers.

Last year, city hall took in $3.7 million from parking tickets. The parking checkers issued 118,656 tickets. Of those, 44,855 were for parking after a pay station receipt or meter expired. Roughly 8 percent of overtime tickets (3,785) were dismissed when people complained for any reason. Another 6,548 were dismissed after people took them to a parking hearing officer.

View full sizeJohn Berry / The Post-StandardThis parking ticket was issued for a car parked on the 300 block of Walton Street.

City officials say they can’t calculate how many fines were paid on tickets that fell within the six-minute window over seven years. City records don’t include the time on the parking machine receipt.

Most of the city has pay stations instead of meters. People use cash or credit cards at the stations and get a receipt that they put on their dashboard that shows the time until which they can legally park.

With the receipts, checkers can know how late someone is. Meters, on the other hand, simply run out. It’s impossible to know whether someone was three minutes late or three hours late.

Ryan said the city doesn’t look at the tickets as revenue. It is budgeting $250,000 less from parking tickets this year and $100,000 less from the state surcharges, which the city has been keeping since 2008 because of a change in state law. Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Albany and Yonkers all get to keep the state money. “In my view, that’s secondary,” Ryan said.

Grace periods might cost some money, but they are worth it, said Helen Sullivan, of the International Parking Institute, a professional organization for the paid and municipal parking industry. “The greater good is that people feel better about the parking,” Sullivan said.

There is no standard on grace periods, said Craig Barber, president of the New York State Parking Association. Barber, chief operating officer of Allpro, a regional parking company based in Buffalo, said that city has an unofficial three-minute grace period. Cincinnati gives people 10 minutes.

Barber said with the precision of pay stations, like Syracuse’s, grace periods are becoming less common. Grace periods had been used to make up for old meters that didn’t keep time quite right, he said.

In Syracuse, the parking rules vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, depending on what that area needs. There are 12-minute spots in some places where parking is at a premium and businesses need high turnover. In some places, like Armory Square, paid parking is until 6 p.m. In Eastwood, it’s 3:30 p.m.

The city’s parking checkers — no one calls them “meter maids” anymore because there are almost no meters left — work different areas of the city every two weeks. They work for the police department, convening in City Hall Commons each morning at 8:30 a.m. before fanning out onto the streets. Their days end at 4:30 p.m.

Each checker has an unofficial quota: 40 tickets a day, Ryan said. Ryan said they cover enough territory that they can pass by the same place twice in a day.

In Armory Square, it’s more like once an hour, said Emily Blakely, who works at Bounce, an Armory Square clothing store. Blakely sometimes parks on the street and she writes herself reminders to feed the pay station. Other girls at the shop set the alarms on their cell phones. She’s gotten snagged twice recently — two tickets for being about 10 minutes over, Blakely said. She didn’t think to complain about either one.

She said feeling that the parking checkers are circling, looking for cars to ticket, affects how people shop. They will come in and say they have only 20 minutes or they will leave in the middle of something to feed a meter. A few customers recently have complained at the shop about getting a ticket within a few minutes of when their time expired.

In Eastwood, there is a hand-lettered sign on the door of Books End, a used bookstore: “Just to let you know, the city is enforcing the pay station law.”

Owner Jim Roberts put the sign up a while back because people were getting tickets so often. Recently, he said one customer got a ticket for being two minutes late. Another was snagged at four minutes, he said. He didn’t think either had complained to City Hall. They would have been forgiven under the six-minute policy.

“I do resent that my customers are being treated like criminals for two or four minutes,” Roberts said.

But Roberts knows the flipside, too. Years back, he called in the parking checkers because people were parked in front of his shop all day, taking spots that his customers needed. “I’d like them to find some happy medium,” Roberts said.

That’s what Ryan, of City Hall, hopes the new grace period is. Nobody likes getting a parking ticket. Not even him. “I’ve had plenty of parking tickets in my life,” he said. “I was all damn mad when I got a ticket. I paid it. But I was mad.”